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<img src="http://www.thetechlounge.com/files/articles/426/index_120.jpg" align="right" alt="Synology Cube Station CS407 NAS"></img>Synology Cube Station CS407 NAS
By Richard Poelling
July 19, 2007

The market for external storage has really started to heat up over the last couple of years. As greater capacities are becoming commonplace, people are finding even more stuff to store. As I have written in the past, the more space a person has, the more they will find to store in it, in the real world as well as the digital one.

Some people can buy that 500 GB, 750 or 1 TB drive and slap it in their computer, but others want more complicated solutions. And the more you have to store, the more you have to lose. It is this increased awareness of data protection as well as storage needs which have given the NAS (network attached storage) market a boost.

Light years ahead of the external hard drive, network attached storage brings with it a huge feature set, from remote accessibility, to automatic backups, and hardware failsafe systems. What is even more amazing is that these feats don't require a second mortgage. Today's NAS contender is the Cube Station CS407 NAS, from a newer company (founded in 2000) called Synology.

The Cube Station CS407 is equipped with an embedded operating system and 128 MB of RAM. It uses the Ext3 file system and supports single volumes, RAID 0, 1 or 5. It supports both Apple and Windows, and features a built-in FTP server, an iTunes server, a multimedia server, a print server, Active Directory Services support, and even a USB hub.